My DC comic book knowledge is pretty limited, so please forgive my ignorance, but apparently the new animated Batman films, The Dark Knight Returns Pt. 1 and 2, are putting a new twist on the old storyline of Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson/Jason Todd/Tim Drake. That twist? Robin’s got some boobs now.

Returns is based on Frank Miller’s four-part series from 1986, which features the newest Robin as a 13-year old girl who helps a 55-year old Batman save Gotham from all the same-old-same-olds and you-know-who’s.

One of the most influential comics of all time, the Dark Knight Returns is set in a near future where Batman is retired and Gotham City has slid into a dystopian state ruled by a gang of hooligans called The Mutants. The 55-year old Bruce Wayne is forced to don the cape once more, this time partnering with a female Robin to not only stop the Joker but keep the peace when the city falls into chaos after being hit by an electromagnetic pulse. (Via the Hollywood Reporter, which also revealed some exclusive images)

As for the animated actors and roles, Batman is voiced by Peter “RoboCop” Weller and his new tween sidekick will be voiced by Modern Family’s Ariel Winter.

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Look, I get it. It’s Friday afternoon. You want to be entertained, but nothing too mentally taxing. Well, I’ve got just the video. It’s a 30-second animation about a British gentleman with a tiny chainsaw. Actually, 30 seconds is a bit misleading. I mean, that’s how long the video is, but I was laughing for way longer. If you don’t like this, we probably can’t be friends.

[via RatherGoodStuff, thanks to the world's tallest Jew for the tip]

YouTube claims this is NSFW and made me sign in to watch it, but aside from some swearing, I’m not sure what’s so NSFW about it.  Oh my God, cartoons having sex that they don’t show with no nudity! Hide the children and put a helmet on the dog!!  Anyway, it comes from some dude named Harry Partridge and is sponsored by Newgrounds, whatever that means.   It’s not the actual Na’avi tentacle sex scene from the script, but I’m not ashamed to say that it made me laugh a lot.  Still, I’m not convinced the actual scene wouldn’t have been just as funny.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some soup to drink.  Vagina soup.

(Hand soup)

[via GorillaMask]

Take this with a grain of salt as it comes from the print version of last month’s Empire magazine, which I’m still waiting to get a scan of, but the magazine has an interview with Tristan Oliver, the cinematographer on the (awesome-looking) Fantastic Mr. Fox.  Oliver seems to imply that Wes Anderson directed the film via email.  Which sounds a lot like, you know, not directing.  From this guy:

According to an inadvertently extraordinary interview with the animators in this month’s Empire, [Wes Anderson] is keeping his distance from the set and directing via e-mail*, sending in his favourite DVDs to give an impression of what he’d like to see. Cinematographer Tristan Oliver, asked about his working relationship with Anderson, replies: [Quoting Empire]  “I think Wes doesn’t understand what you can do, and he often wants us to do what you can’t do, and the length of time the process takes … I don’t think he quite comprehends that, and how difficult it is to change something once you’ve started. It takes a big amount of someone’s time to change a very small thing. I think he also doesn’t understand that an animator is a performer. An animator is an actor. And this is the secret to animation: you direct your animator, you do not direct the puppet, because the puppet is an inanimate object. You direct an animator as if you’re directing an actor, and they will give you a performance. So we’ll get a note back from Wes saying ‘that arm movement is wrong.’ But that arm movement is part of a fluid performance. And that has been really quite difficult for the animators.”

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Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was a children’s book from the seventies about a town called Chewandswallow where it rained food, written by someone who was probably really high.  Sony made a movie out of it, and as you can see from the trailer below, they turned it into an origin story about how it came to be that this town rains meatballs.  Pixar seems to be the only animation studio that can do kids’ movies without babytalking, so to speak, and since I don’t have any kids that I know of, I have hard time giving a crap about a movie like this. I’ll let FirstShowing handle it:

In comparison to Planet 51 [I'll have that trailer up later today -ed.], I actually want to see this one just a bit more. Something about all that food and the comedy, it just gets me. Though I’m worried that like Sony Animation’s last movie, Surf’s Up, it won’t be as good as the trailers make it seem.

Yes, you see, the food and the comedy, it really gets him.  Fascinating, right?

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